Sadly, there was only limited space available and we had to apologise to Cairo, San Salvador, Lagos, Warsaw and Delhi – it’s tough at the top and the Road Junky decision is final.
Let it not be said that we’re not democratic, though – if you would like to suggest any other candidates for nuclear annihilation, we’ll happily listen and perhaps add your city to the list under ‘notable contenders’
1.Bombay
Bombay is the logical conclusion of everything that’s gone wrong in India. The pollution, the over-population, the communal violence, the corruption – it’s like a bad dream that never ends and it seems unlikely that India will ever wake it from it.
There are parts of Bombay with over a million inhabitants per square mile, breathing the air here is like smoking 20 cigarettes a day and whilst the money rolls into the country from outside investors, the poor get even poorer than they were before with no reliable water supply, no sewage system and no rights.
Bombay is just manic. Around 400 people die each month just from overcrowding on the internal train system. The only miracle is that the poor just take the shit they’re given with such calm and good grace – but then comes a Hindu-Muslim riot and thousands are slaughtered in a day while the police look the other way.
2.Dubai
Whatever nobility and stout spirit the Arabs had in their Bedouin days, they lost it with the discovery of oil. Done with chewing old dates and slurping camel milk, the easy money of oil wealth ensured that they could do whatever they wanted.
So they imported a million cheap workers from India and Pakistan to do the actual work and set about transforming Dubai from a fishing village to a messy excuse for a city, with garish architectural monstrosities designed to pull in tourists dumb enough to visit for reasons like that.
The cities feel like they’ve been grafted on top of the dust and the sand, the sky scrapers just glued on to a construction site. As you drive around the country, you get the feeling that the desert is just waiting to claim it all back.
The local Arabs strut around lifting nothing heavier than a spoon, lock the women away, treat the workers like shit and maintain legions of Russian prostitutes flown in for their exotic white flesh.
3.Liverpool and Manchester
Liverpool may have produced the Beatles and Manchester the worlds most famous football team but those are scarcely reasons for actually visiting the places. Whilst the cities do actually have a good deal more humour and wit then some of the industrial towns in northern England – it’s grim up north – Liverpool and Manchester are as depressing places as you’re likely to find anywhere.
To begin with, the scousers (the inhabitants of Liverpool, so named after a truly revolting sauce called scouse) and the Mancunians are renowned for being incorrigible scallywags and conmen. Take Bez, the Freaky Dancing guy from the Happy Mondays who used to take a pork pie into a pub, ask for a sip from a friend’s beer and then cough a mouthful of crumbs into the glass – which he naturally ended up inheriting.
But whilst the locals can be entertaining on a good day, the weather is shit, heroin is epidemic (but meth is catching on) and you’ve got a better chance of thugs putting you in hospital for no apparent reason than in any other part of England – and that’s saying something.
4.Guatemala City
Guatemala City is about a dangerous a place as the traveler is ever likely to pass through. The buses have bullet holes in them, gangs rule the streets and scars from the civil war and deaths squads of the 80’s (largely thanks to US financial and military backup) have left a legacy of violence that shows no signs of abating.
Just down the road from appealing Guatemala destinations like Lake Atilan and Antigua, Guatemala city is the kind of place you want to pass through for no more than about 20 minutes and then only in the morning. Every year backpackers make the mistake of walking down the street in search of a cheap hostel only to be mugged and possibly hospitalised after less than 20 metres.
Of course, you might not get mugged. There’s always the chance of just being beaten up, raped of even kidnapped, the latter being Latin America’s fastest growth industry.
That said, if you’re tough as shit, speak Espanol chingon and don’t mind walking around with a can of mace in each pocket, we’d rate your chances as 50/50. But whatever you do, don’t walk around after dark.
5.Sao Paulo
Sao Paulo is the kind of city for which the word ‘metropolis’ was invented. It’s home (for want of a better word) to over 25 million people and there are more lurching skyscrapers than you could fly a fleet of planes into. (Not that Brazil has any kind of foreign policy that could provoke such a reaction if they wanted to, they’re far too busy oppressing their own people)
Even the Paulistas rarely have a good word to say about the crowded, unjust city in which they live in, quite a thing in a country where people are fiercely proud to be Brazilian. They even sound apologetic for living in Sao Paulo in the first place but shrug and mention the good salaries and leave it at that.
Naturally, there are some cool night clubs to service the people making the money (they hardly cater to the millions who aren’t sure what they’ll eat tomorrow) but it’s common enough that Brazilians from Sao Paulo will even fly out to somewhere cool in Brazil for the weekend before returning back for the slog on Monday morning.
Oh, and did we mention that it’s really dangerous?
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